Gloucestershire Old Spots
Have a Gloucestershire Old Spots to sell? List it.Threatened on the Conservation Priority List, 2026 edition
About Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs
The Gloucestershire Old Spot is a white pig with big black spots, heavy lop ears that fall forward, and a famously easy temperament. It came out of the Vale of Berkeley in Gloucestershire in the 1800s and is the oldest pedigreed spotted pig breed.
It was a smallholder's pig, and what it ate says everything about the system it belonged to: whey from the dairy, windfall apples from the orchard, and the pressings left over from making cider. Hence the nicknames, cottage pig and orchard pig. English folklore has it that the black spots are bruises from apples falling on their backs.
The actual ancestry is lost. The breed appears in English writing around 1790, and the likeliest parents are the original Gloucestershire pig, a large off-white animal with floppy ears and wattles, and the unimproved Berkshire, sandy with prick ears and black spots. Both are extinct. The Lincolnshire Curly Coat may have contributed too, and it is extinct as well.
What survived is thrifty, hardy, good at foraging roots and vegetation, and a very good mother.
Sourced from The Livestock Conservancy and the breed’s registry, reviewed by HoofnHorn.
No Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs at auction right now.
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